The Paragons of the Klaxxi are no more. At least for this reset.

205 wipes, so quite a bit. Most of the time a very enjoyable experience though. Not often  an encounter is that dynamic and surprising. Random even, in the good way, non-scripted.

As it often is the case when fighting bugs (mhm), we did run into an inconvenient glitch or two, which at some point was getting mildly irritating. Regardless, we found a band-aid to that and moved on. Rumour has it we have not just one, but in fact 2 kill videos being made, presenting the fight from very different perspectives.

Next and final step is, obviously, Garrosh. That wil take some doing, but for once it doesn’t seem like we’re under immidiate time pressure. Now it’s just a matter of making sure the roster doesn’t shrink to the point where getting raids going becomes an issue. Other than that, we should have what it takes to stand a good chance of clearing SoO before the pre-WoD patch.

So this kill require some more comment than the usual. Almost exactly 2 months since we killed the previous boss, Thok the Bloodthirsty. 320 wipes. That’s not an amount of attempts to be sneezed at, certainly the most spent on a single boss in the last 2 expansions (rumor has it Lich King might have sucked even more blood of us, but that didn’t end in a kill, so not quite the same).

No doubt the boss is hard, no doubt there’s only so much good gear will help you with here. In our case, however, the greatest obstacle was the Christmas holidays, which somehow magically transformed into almost a month of no progression raiding. People had obligations, increased workload (yeah, let’s face it, by now it’s work rather than school for most of us), travels. Worse still, at the same time we’ve lost a few solid raiders who came to the conclusion they could afford and wanted to try out a 4 raids per week schedule. No hard feelings at all and all the more power to them, someone’s gotta keep Azeroth safe on the days we cannot attend to it! Still, it did result in some pretty tricky recruitment, where we needed rather geared players willing to join us while the raid size squish planned for WoD is on the horizon. With all this in mind, the first few dozens of pulls after Christmas break felt rather underwheling, since we had to give the new guys some time to learn the basics.

In the end we, as usual, did manage to overcome the difficulties, new people got the hang of it and things were falling back on tracks. Having had some wipes in the range of 10% by the end of the previous raid, spirits and expectations were high for Sunday. Even more so seeing as a nerf to the encounter was announced meanwhile, effective next reset!

We are all the more proud to present the following photo of a very dead goblin with a strong Mimiron-esque flavor.

It would be very unfair not to emphasize one more thing. Huge thanks to the people who ended up on standby the evening the boss died. With all those wipes behind us, no one was keen on missing the kill. It really is a pleasure to hang out with mature people.

Pull number 50 proved to be the lucky one. The grand dinosaur with a tendency to eat running people is very dead. This is a good thing, the fight is, delicately speaking, designed in a non-flawless way. It’s very punishing for some classes and strongly against the whole “bring the player not the class” logic.

Regardless, it needed to be done, so done it is. No more chomping of cute Enigmas for now, Jurassic Park cleared.

We all know what it means though. Siegemaster Blackfuse. We had some first pulls and to wrap it up – the ressurection cooldown proves to be an issue.

Second of the bosses we decided to skip in the start and dead it is on the first proper day of practice. Another very satisfying encounter, both thanks to very good design as well as some tactid adjustment that we figured out.

An execution type of an encounter this time, so not the sort where new gear made a great difference. Entertaining learning curve too, with the obligatory 1% wipe and some enjoyable fine-tuning of the tactic. Ironically enough, the kill wasn’t the smoothest of the attempts we had with some avoidable early deaths. A kill nonetheless.

Third boss in the natural order in the instance, but fifth for us to face. Things actually started to “click” quite early, so it felt like we were in for a smooth kill. However, few attempts later it turned out that the same reason that made it somewhat smooth – a third tank – also made the dps requirement fairly significant.

This actually made the fight quite entertaining, with some close-but-not-close-enough attempts. We didn’t have ou standard 1% wipe this time, technically, however the kill itself was equally exciting, with the boss and the entire raid dying at the very same moment.

So far so good, safe to say we’re satisfied with the progress. However, we are slowly running out of the easier bosses, so soon enough things might get a little more entertaining.

Having defeated the first 2 bosses in the previous reset, we faced a dilemma which ones to target next. Obvious choice was to simply follow them in the natural order, but we chose to proceed otherwise. Since the third boss, Norushen, is in part a gear check and we previously sacrificed some farming time for the sake of progression, we chose to skip that for now and targeted boss number 5, Galakras. The fact that Norushen was hotfixed, if not redisgned, just recently only backed that decision up.

Galakras proved to by quite an entertaining encounter, much more so than in normal mode. It took some attempts to figure out the optimal dps division, priority of targets and general timing for the first phase. Then, to our satisfaction, we managed to get the second part of the encounter sorted out after we only saw it once. Soon after, a kill followed.

One not very positive aspect of the raid that killed the boss was that we had quite a few signups that day, hence choosing those to sit out was fairly unpleasent. Big thanks to those who did end up on the bench, I realize it’s not satisfying to participate in the learning process, but then miss the kill.

Oh yes, and the title of the post IS indeed a smart reference to Galatasaray Sporting Club!

First some pulls to get the hang of how the mechanics feel in practice, then some to eliminate personal mistakes. Then an extra healer, because the damage is just impossible to heal through, only to realize it’s in fact bad handling of the debuff that’s holding us back. Once that is fixed an enrage wipe. Next raid some toying around with the tactic, but then back to basics, fair few attempts to fine-tune everything and then a kill.

Somehow we can’t force ourselves to really consider Immerseus a proper heroic kill, however Protectors felt appropriate for an early boss in hard mode. We are glad to have it done in first week after killing Garrosh.

We pulled heroic Immerseus and he died. Not much more to say. No proper screenshot, because it didn’t deserve it. Just a proof he is in fact out of the picture (pun intended!)

Fallen Protectors are more like it though, we saw enrage on our first night at them, but due to flawed tactic we were missing a great deal of damage to finish them of. Now the tactic is improved, next raid will show how close we can get.

Since patch 5.4 and the Siege of Ogrimmar release we have been hard at work, so little time was left to update the frontpage.

We are happy to report that Pandaria is safe again, at least in its normal incarnation. We managed to reach Garrosh, the final villain as soon as in the first reset and then we had enough time to clear the place again and get the job done the second week. The moment he was defeated various notable personas arrived, argued a little and gave as a virtual pat in the back (for most players, myself being a gnome, it was more of a bald spot pat).

So far Siege of Ogrimmar made a good impression. The low difficulty level of most of the early bosses did feel a little awkward, but things built up and later on it felt more appropriate. And normal mode of Garrosh encounter felt great, it had that much desired suspense reinforced by the growing pressure of time.

With normal mode cleared in 2 weeks, we are all set for heroics. Or at least that is what we dare to think, let us see if the next raid ends up being a cold shower. More so now that the initial bosses were actually made a little harder than they were in the start!